Report from the Front
I took care of a veteran on the palliative care unit of a COVID floor at Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan. He was in his seventies, dying from COVID. His children wanted to come in and say goodbye to their dad. Since the pandemic, we’ve been very strict on visitors, but if somebody is actively dying, we try to accommodate the family, so we arranged for them to come in and say goodbye. Our nurse manager, Renee Sanchez, whose dad is also a vet, said we had to do something for this family. The children came in and we all geared up in our personal protective equipment (PPE) and went into the room, too. They were extremely proud of their father and his service to our country.
The son and daughter both spoke about their dad. A vet who works in our hospital, Frank Kachelle, said a few words of appreciation. Deirdre O’Flaherty, our director of nursing, found the US Navy band’s version of “The Star Spangled Banner” and she played it on her iPhone. Deirdre’s husband is also a vet.
The children were emotional, but they had this beautiful moment, which so many people didn’t have during COVID. A lot of people have died alone. I think this family at least had their peace. They got to say goodbye, and we cried with them.
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Around that same time I was taking care of a lady in her seventies whose husband was very sick. I really got to know her. I had met her in the emergency room the week before because her husband had come in very, very sick from COVID and had to be put on a ventilator in the ICU.
I’m a float nurse, so I work everywhere in the hospital, which gave me a very good perspective during this whole thing, because I saw it from the lens of the emergency room. I saw it from the lens of being on the actively dying COVID floor. I saw it from the lens of being in the critical care stepdown unit trying to save people. I kind of got a full spectrum of treating COVID patients.
A few days after her husband was admitted, this lady became sick also. She was very vibrant, very young for her age. She was on oxygen and definitely sick, but not as sick as her husband. I was taking care of her on a unit that was the next hallway over from the ICU where her husband was, but she couldn’t see him, couldn’t be there with him. She couldn’t hold his hand or touch his face. All she could do to feel connected to him was to pray for him. At night I would be with her and we would pray. She was lovely. She was extremely sick herself, and yet she was so nice to me. We cried together, we held hands together. I was pretty tough on her. I made her get out of the bed and sit in the chair, and she was huffing and puffing. She wasn’t eating, so I made her eat. Every day when I walked in she was like, Emily!
Her husband was on a ventilator for multiple weeks. I thought he had no chance of living. He was extremely, extremely sick to the point where his wife and I had a conversation about who would make final medical decisions. They had no children so we had to call one of their relatives to make him the health-care proxy in the event that, God forbid, if anything happened to both of them there would be a proxy to make their medical decisions. That was really hard. I felt really close to her. I actually thought her husband would not make it, but then he got the breathing tube out and came off the ventilator. This was when a majority of patients on ventilators did not make it. But he started to recover.
I showed up for a shift after a few days off and there they were together, she and her husband recovering in the same room. Before I even walked in the room she heard my voice and she said to her husband, oh my God, it’s my nurse Emily. This is one who took care of me. And I loved meeting him and telling him how I had been taking care of his wife and how we had prayed for him. I will never forget that couple. They ended up going home together.
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At the beginning there was so much anxiety. Would we run out of ventilators? Would we have to choose who got a ventilator? What was that going to look like? And then when we were at the top of the curve, I was just working, working, working, too busy to think about anything. Coming off the curve was very weird. You’d just gone through this crazy thing. I had no time to process it. I was running on adrenaline, running on anxiety.
I’ve been a nurse for almost ten years. I have never in my ten years done an overtime shift. I always thought I was a better nurse when I had some time off and would come in refreshed. So the nursing office said Emily, are you okay? Why are you working so much? I just felt this great need to be on the front line for my city. I wanted to be in the thick of things. I felt better being at work than being home in my apartment alone. I wasn’t sleeping. I wasn’t eating. I lost a lot of weight.
I wanted to be there for New Yorkers. I wanted to fight COVID for New York. I wanted to defend my city against this weird virus that we knew nothing about. So I felt this calling. I’ve done a lot of mission work, a lot of mission trips internationally—Kenya, Venezuela, and for the hurricane in Puerto Rico. I’d worked aboard the USNS Comfort. I felt like I was on a mission for New York City. I lived at the hospital for that month and a half, and it was just where I needed to be.